As the title suggests, I now have a playable main character for my project! Guess who it is?

This was my first time experimenting with a lot of different things. The only experience I’ve had with platformers was in 2D, and the only 3D games I’ve made were in a first person perspective. And of course, I’ve never made something so ambitious in Unreal before.

I wanted to build everything from the ground up, so I decided to follow a tutorial instead of modifying the 3rd person base that Unreal provides. I only took the most basic movement and camera controls before heading off to adventure on my own. These pieces gave me just enough information to build a solid foundation for the rest of my character script.

My biggest regret is not setting up version control. I never lost big sections of work thanks to Unreal’s autosaving, but I can’t provide a detailed account of the work process, so I’ll just describe the Mario that I have and not how we got here.

Feature Set

Mario can walk in 360 degrees, and by holding the top or left face buttons he will begin speeding up. He’ll be in a run phase for about 2 seconds before launching into a sprint. Rotating the control stick smoothly will gradually adjust the direction Mario moves in, but if the change in direction from one frame to the next is greater than 45 degrees he’ll enter a skidding animation. The right face button will make him jump, and the bottom face button will make him spin jump. These jumps will have different velocities depending on whether Mario is standing still, moving, or sprinting. Mario’s gravity scale also changes depending on whether he’s reached the apex of his jump and whether the jump button is being held.

In the original game, crouching and looking up are performed by holding down and up on the D-pad. These were the only controls I couldn’t directly translate, because up and down were now being used to move forward and back. My solution was to assign these commands to the left and right bumpers.

I also did a lot of work on the camera controls, but I’ll save that for it’s own post. For now, I’ve got a Mario that’s just about finished! you can move him in all the ways that you can move the original. Now It’s time to make him some Koopas to stomp.